[Python-Dev] Include ctypes into core Python? (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Wed Jan 11 00:12:43 CET 2006

On 1/10/06, Delaney, Timothy (Tim) <tdelaney at avaya.com> wrote:

Guido van Rossum wrote:

> On 1/10/06, Thomas Heller <theller at python.net> wrote: >> I would like to suggest to include ctypes into core Python, starting >> with the 2.5 release. > > On the one hand I agree that this is a useful module, popular, mature > etc. > > On the other hand it breaks one of the most fundamental Python > guidelines: if you get a core dump (segfault etc.) it's a bug in > Python or in a 3rd party extension, not in your Python code. An > exception would have to be made for any code that uses ctypes, as it > is usually trivial to cause core dumps with ctypes (I'd venture it's > hard to avoid them ;-). > > I don't expect this to count against including ctypes; but I do want > it to be dealt with somehow! As was pointed out on c.l.py, the dl module suffers the exact same problem (I don't know myself, as I've never used it). There are no warnings about this in the dl module documentation.

Good point. I think there should be such warnings though.

I can't see how it would be possible to guarantee that such a module could not cause crashes.

And I'm not asking for that.

I'm of the opinion that having a big red warning at the top of the module documentation that this is a contributed module, and incorrect use could cause segmentation faults/crashes, etc would be sufficient.

Works for me.

-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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